The Dodge Charger 500 is a NASCAR Nextel Cup stock car race held at the Darlington Raceway in Darlington, South Carolina. It is run on Saturday night, and is the result of the merger of Darlington's two Nextel Cup Series events: the Carolina Dodge Dealers 400, and the Mountain Dew Southern 500 and the result of NASCAR realigning its schedule for 2005. For more on the reason for this merger, see NASCAR Realignment. The final Mountain Dew Southern 500 was run on Sunday, November 14, 2004.

Darlington Raceway is a race track built for NASCAR racing located near Darlington, South Carolina. It was the first superspeedway built with NASCAR racing in mind and is of a unique, somewhat egg-shaped design, an oval with the ends of very different configurations, a condition which supposedly arose from the proximity of one end of the track to a minnow pond the owner refused to relocate. This situation makes it very challenging for the crews to set up their cars' handling in a way that will be effective at both ends.

Darlington has an interesting history. When the 1.366 mile (2.2 km) long track first opened over a half-century ago, it was not unknown for there to be 80 or more entrants in a race; this was curtailed over the years as NASCAR adopted a more uniform set of guidelines with regard to the number of cars which could qualify for a race. In recent years the track has been reconfigured; what was the front stretch is now the back stretch, and the turns have been renumbered accordingly. Seating has been increased to approximately 60,000; it has been limited by the proximity of a railroad track to the facility, a highway behind the back stretch, and the still-present pond.

Darlington has something of a legendary quality among drivers and older fans; this is probably due to its status as the first NASCAR superspeedway and hence the first venue where many of them became cognizant of the truly high speeds that stock cars could achieve on a long track. It is often referred to as The Lady in Black, allegedly because the walls around the track are always painted white prior to a race but are always largely black by the end of it due to a profusion of tire contacts. Darlington is also known as "The Track Too Tough to Tame", and rookie racers hitting the wall are considered to have received their "Darlington stripe".

For many years Darlington has been the site of two annual Winston Cup races; one was held in the spring and the other, the Southern 500 (its name has varied in recent years due to sale of naming rights but this is what fans generally continued to call it), was always held on Labor Day weekend. In 2003, the Labor Day event was given to California Speedway, effective 2004 and replaced by a race run in November; recently NASCAR announced that in 2005 there will be only one Nextel Cup race run at Darlington, which offended many traditionalists. The track is now owned by International Speedway Corporation, which is controlled by NASCAR's founding France family, so this can be done without incurring legal problems which have sometimes resulted from NASCAR's attempts to move races in the past at tracks which it did not control.